How to become a Climate Hero in five easy steps

It’s never been easier, or more necessary, for people to start taking action and saving the planet. If you start, who knows what you could achieve, you could be a Climate Hero of the future. This is how to be a climate activist in five easy steps:

1. Learn about what’s happening to the planet and research your topic
Before you get started you need to decide what you’re going to campaign about. Are you going to plant trees like Sebastião Salgado or campaign against plastic pollution like Amy and Ella Meek? Once you’ve picked a topic, the first thing you need to do is learn about it.

If you’ve chosen reforestation, like Salgado, you might want to learn about the importance of trees in tackling climate change. You might want to learn about actions people have taken in the past, like the Cascadia Forest Defenders who have been setting up tree-sit blockades since the 1990s to thwart the logging industry. Whatever you want to do, someone may have already tried to do it and you can learn from them.

2. Start to educate other people about the problem you’re campaigning about
Once you’ve learnt about the topic you’re going to campaign on, you need to start educating other people about your cause. You might have learnt that roughly 1.6 billion people depend on forests, which are also home to more than 80 percent of all the species of animals, plants and insects on earth. You will have discovered that we’re losing millions of hectares of forest area due to deforestation, but how many other people know all this? You could start an online video channel or form a campaign group to start spreading the word.

3. Make the case for people to take action around your issue
After telling people there’s a problem, you need to encourage them to start taking action. You might be letting people know they need to stop using single-use plastics or you could be writing letters to logging companies asking them to stop cutting down trees. You’ve already let people know what the problems are, now you need to be providing people with the solutions. If you’ve launched a campaign group, this is something you could do collectively. If you’ve got a video channel, you could make a video encouraging people to take action.

4. Start getting people organized and ready for action
You’re not going to be able to be a climate hero all by yourself, you need to work with other people. When Amy and Ella Meek launched Kids Against Plastic back in 2016 they built a crew of kids across the UK that they could work with to tackle plastic pollution.

If you’re going to be taking action around your campaign issue, you need to plan it all out. If you’re going to be mobilizing your supporters to do something, they need to know what, where and when they’re expected to be doing something. For Greta Thunberg, she let her supporters know they should walk out of their schools on a Friday. You might not be going that far (or going further) but you need to use simple messaging so people know what they need to do.

5. Take action to further your cause
You’ve learnt about the topic you care about and the change you want to cause, you’ve educated others about both these things, identified solutions and got people organized. You’ve got everything planned, everybody knows what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, now is the time to take action and make sparks fly. Are you going to the Amazon to regrow the rainforest, taking to the oceans to clean up plastic or doing something else entirely? Whatever you’ve chosen to do, it’s taking action which takes you from climate zero to hero.

You might not want to go as far as Greta Thunberg, Sebastião Salgado or the Meek sisters and that’s okay. That level of activism isn’t for everybody. But there is a part to play for all of us when it comes to tackling climate change, reducing biodiversity loss and trying to reduce humanity’s impact on the environment. By taking collective action, we can start to change our behavior, embrace low-carbon lifestyles, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save animal and plant life and start to live in a better and more sustainable world.

Whatever part we’re playing, it’s by acting together that we can make things go right. As outspoken American anthropologist Margaret Mead is reported to have once said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”